Thinner

How to spell thinner

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thinner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thinner mean?

1. adjectiveHaving less thickness, width, or body than something else being compared.
2. nounA liquid solvent used to dilute paint or varnish or to clean brushes.

Thinner in a sentence

• adjective

  This laptop is noticeably thinner than my old one.

• noun

  He wiped the dried gloss off the bristles with a little thinner.

• adjective

  She rolled the pastry until it was much thinner and easier to fold.

• noun

  Add a small amount of thinner if the varnish has become too sticky.

Where does thinner come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word thin descends from the Old English thynne, meaning 'slender' or 'not thick', which itself traces back to a shared Germanic root that also gave Dutch dun and German duenn. The very deepest ancestry reaches an Indo-European root meaning 'stretched out', the same idea that sits behind the Latin tenuis 'slender' (the source of 'tenuous'). The comparative form thinner simply adds the ending -er, and because thin ends in a short stressed vowel followed by a single consonant, English doubles that consonant before the ending, which is exactly why it is spelled with two n letters. The noun sense, a liquid solvent used to dilute paint, grew out of the plain idea of making something thinner in consistency and became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as commercial paints spread. The doubled n is the spelling trap here, since the single-n base word can tempt writers into writing only one.

How the word is built

• thin (from Old English thynne)
• doubled n
• -er (comparative/agent suffix)